The Los Angeles River

Through culverts to the sea

A waterway that says a lot about its city

IN THE 1980s, when Lewis MacAdams founded Friends of the Los Angeles River, his non-profit organisation, “my first job was trying to convince people that the river existed.” The waterway is certainly easy to miss, even for locals. Once it emerges from the San Fernando Valley to run through downtown Los Angeles and various industrial cities before spilling into the Pacific near the port of Long Beach, the “river” is really a pathetic trickle composed almost entirely of treated sewage. It runs in a concrete channel under freeways and along railway tracks, invisible to most people. Graffiti mark the turfs of rival gangs. It smells not of fresh water but of hobo urine, slaughterhouses and factories.

A Parisian, Londoner or New Yorker might find this sad—no quays, cafés, promenades, boat cruises. Not so Mr MacAdams, who is a professional poet, though with a wry political and ecological bent (influences include William Carlos Williams and a German sculptor, Joseph Beuys). He approaches his mission of saving the river “not with sadness, but optimism and humour”, he says, as he climbs over a fence under an echoing highway to descend the embankment to a tiny and improbable oasis of greenery in the river bed.

The river, Mr MacAdams says, reflects its city, for better and worse, and not necessarily in obvious ways. When the Spanish arrived in the 18th century it still flowed unpredictably, changing its course often (sometimes flowing into the Pacific near today's Santa Monica) and turning the entire area into a marshy wetland. The largest Indian settlement and subsequent Spanish pueblo were near today's downtown, somewhat elevated and safe from floods.

After 1876, when the transcontinental railroad reached Los Angeles, the modern pattern took hold: a confusing regime in which private developers and various levels of government pumped, dammed, diverted and otherwise subdued the river. In a few awesome fits, the river fought back. Two flash floods in the 1930s, in particular, burst through the manmade structures and washed away lives and settlements. In the spirit of the times, which favoured grand federal works, the Army Corps of Engineers then shackled the river in its current concrete.

Ecologically and aesthetically, that seemed to spell the end of the river per se. Where once it had recycled mountain rain into a vast aquifer underneath, its hard bottom now ushers occasional floodwater right out to sea. The aquifer is small and shrinking, and has long ceased to provide water to Angelenos (aqueducts, the result of California's notorious “water wars”, instead pipe water in from afar). In terms of urban architecture, the river plays no role at all. In the 1990s it was named one of America's most “endangered” rivers.

But times change, and Mr MacAdams's outfit is now one of several that take an interest in the river. Last year the federal government declared it “navigable”, which has bureaucratic benefits for those who want to clean it. A few brave Angelenos even kayak on it. Mr MacAdams proudly points to a newish bicycle path, built with his support (and entirely unused when this correspondent visited). “Our megalomaniacal scheme”, he says, is to convert a huge railway yard owned by Union Pacific (nicknamed “Piggyback Yard” because it is used for reloading) into a riparian park. And thence onward to a wholesale renaissance of the river.

Or not. Mr MacAdams, aged 66, seems philosophical, or poetic, about his quest and the meaning of the river. He sees more nuance in it than outsiders or most locals. Nothing about it is natural; and yet nature constantly reclaims parts of it. In a city that worships, without irony, organic, local food grown with distant water and bodies simultaneously toned by holistic yoga and cosmetic surgery, the river mirrors what it runs through.